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II. 1973: "Why Separate Women's Art?", a revised amalgam of prefaces to the catalogues for: Ten Artists (Who Also Happen to be Women), the Kenan Art Center, Lockport, N.Y., and the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts center, Fredonia, N.Y, Jan. 1973; Women Choose Women, organized and selected by Women in the Arts, The New York Cultural Center, New York city, Fall 1973; Art and Artists (Women's Issue), Oct. 1973.

A large-scale exhibition of Women's art in New York [Women Choose Women] is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in general group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists towhom to look as role models; because although 75% of the undergraduate art students are female, only 2% of their teachers are female. And above all -- because the New York Museums have been particularly discriminatory,usually under the guise of being discriminating.

A couple of years ago, even a sympathetic observer could dredge up the names of no more than 20 women artists who were well known at all. Even other women artists had trouble [[strikethrough]] doing so [[/strikethrough]] remembering colleagues. This, I suspect, was as much a psychological block on their part as a statistical fact,having to do with not wanting to be identified as a woman artist. A simultaneous pride in uniqueness and an underlying fear of inferiority seemed then to affect the ranks of women artists themselves. Yet once the protests and meetings and shows began in New York, women's own memories loosened up to the point where endless friends from art school who had been working away in silence suddenly began to surface, and groups began to get together for Consciousness-Raising, for esthetic discussion, for political actions, to remedy